Welcome Back.
As we all know around here, Jeanne and I are at our absolute best when we are completely overwrought with orders, deadlines, and demands. Here is a little bit about our past few days... Friday morning found me at the high school in Centralia, sharing my thoughts with business-minded teenagers regarding entrepreneurship. It found Jeanne running the PJP Buttonwood show. And it found neither of us with our normal coffee run/morning meeting routine, which impacted how we both felt for the rest of the day (hint: it was tired...we felt tired, and with a hint of stabby). And when we finally found each other in the same space for the afternoon, we could only discuss one thing...hamantash.
Hamantash is a pocket-filled pastry, most often recognized for its triangular shape. They are usually enjoyed during the Jewish holiday of Purim. A few weeks ago, we received a call from a local synagogue asking if we would like to provide some sample hamantash for tasting and if we proved that we had some serious hamantash baking skills, the synagogue would be interested in ordering 72 DOZEN HAMANTASH. That's 864 hamantash, for those of you that just reached for your iPhone calculator. And after a few rounds of competition, just know that Team PJP came out victorious. We proudly plan to change our motto to "World Pie Domination (and sometimes Hamantash too)".
And all of this is just a long way to explain to how we got to this picture on Instagram late Friday afternoon...
The Monster energy drink was to propel me through the rest of the afternoon, the wine and UV Cherry were for Friday night cocktail hour, and the poppyseed is for the 18 dozen poppyseed hamantash on order. Hy-vee is likely still scratching its head over who bought 6 pounds of poppyseeds from their bulk foods section, thereby basically emptying the poppyseed bin with one purchase.
In what amounted to essentially the middle of the night on Friday/Saturday, we began hamantash preparations in earnest for a noon pick-up. We needed to bake 18 dozen cherry, 19 dozen apple, 18 dozen prune, and above mentioned 18 dozen poppyseed. And once we figured out how to fold them in just the correct way, you couldn't hold us back.
After 864 of our newest friends were packaged and headed off to their celebration, we quickly shifted gears to focus selling all the pie at PJP Buttonwood before closing at 1pm and starting to set up for a birthday party for a 5 year-old that was off-the-charts ADORABLE. And at first thought, you might think taking a group of 10 four and five-year-olds through the process of baking a dutch apple pie is daunting, but it is actually a lot of fun and surprisingly less difficult than you would guess. It was a charming set of kids and it is clear to me that PJP will have no shortage of skilled bakers in 12 years or so.
And then we went home. And I couldn't even muster up the full energy to indulge my Frank Underwood House of Cards Season Three desire that had been nagging at me for a full 24 hours. Frank takes a lot of mental focus and I really only had enough for DVR'd episodes of The Amazing Race. (Yep, we know how to rock out a Saturday night at our house.)
And then yesterday, we rallied ourselves again for a completely different sort of baking party from the previous day...a sweet family celebrated the birthdays of the grandfather and granddaughter by learning to make a German Chocolate pie together. At only a party of six, it was cozy and interesting and just like baking with friends. Proving once again, we may have the very best jobs in the world..
Today though...today, I found all my mental energy for Frank. He is TOP NOTCH. As usual.
